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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25396780">Birds of Piracy</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/rowenablade/pseuds/rowenablade'>rowenablade</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Birds of Prey (And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) (2020)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Pirate, Anachronistic Language, Canon-Typical Misogyny, Canon-Typical Violence, Crack, Era-Typical Hygiene, Gen, I Don't Even Know, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, POV First Person</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 02:08:05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>7,390</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25396780</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/rowenablade/pseuds/rowenablade</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Backing up a bit: you may be wondering how I got stranded on a desert island in the first place. Who’d I piss off to get myself marooned on tiny, uncharted, asshole-bird-infested scrap of jungle in the middle of the Atlantic? Well, first of all, shame on you for assuming I did something to deserve it. So I escaped indentured servitude, fell in with one of the most feared pirate crews on the high seas and maybe set <i>one</i> Royal Navy ship on fire. Okay, two, but the second one was already sinking. Call it one and a half. Still, can’t a girl get the benefit of the doubt?</p><p>Or: Birds of Prey, but with pirates. That's it. That's the fic.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>25</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>10</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Chapter 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This fic brought to you by <i>Pirates of the Caribbean</i>, the lost summer of 2020, and the relentless encouragement of one Stanningjay.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>You ever play the Desert Island game? Let’s say you know you’re gonna be stranded on a deserted island for the foreseeable future. Rescue isn’t an option. Let’s stretch the imagination a little farther and say all your food and water is gonna be magically provided, so that’s not something you need to worry about. What’s the one thing you’d bring with you? The one thing you can’t live without?</p><p>For some people, the game’s a fantasy. For others it’s a chance to show off how smart they are. I’ll bet you could ask a thousand people, though, and never get “earplugs” as an answer.</p><p>Wouldn’t have been my first choice. Not until that goddamn parrot showed up.</p><p>Backing up a bit: you may be wondering how I got stranded on a desert island in the first place. Who’d I piss off to get myself marooned on tiny, uncharted, asshole-bird-infested scrap of jungle in the middle of the Atlantic? Well, first of all, shame on you for assuming I did something to deserve it. So I escaped indentured servitude, fell in with one of the most feared pirate crews on the high seas and maybe set <i>one</i> Royal Navy ship on fire. Okay, two, but the second one was already sinking. Call it one and a half. Still, can’t a girl get the benefit of the doubt?</p><p>Don’t laugh, but I was actually well on my way to upstanding citizenship before I met Captain Kerr. Yeah, I was an indentured servant, which is basically just one step up from being a slave, but I was indentured to a doctor and picked up quite a bit of knowledge. By a year into my contract I could set a bone or suture a laceration twice as fast as any of his other assistants. And there were a lot of opportunities to practice, because Dr. Crane wasn’t above treating people who’s professions took them…outside of the law, let’s say. That’s how I met my ex-Captain. One minute I was bringing boiled water and fresh towels to Dr. Crane’s surgery, the next I was face-to-face with Joseph Kerr, captain of the <i>Jester</i>, scourge of the Crown and terror of Port Gotham. With his pale skin and his mouth full of silver teeth, it was like meeting someone made of moonlight, and the first time we kissed I felt like he was breathing me full of stars.</p><p><i>Young Miss Quinzel,</i> he said to me, when Dr. Crane had left the room. <i>Have you ever seen the Northern Lights?</i></p><p>That night, we stood in the light of Dr. Crane’s burning house, and he put his arm around me.</p><p>
  <i>Well, we’re facing North, anyway. And it’s pretty, isn’t it? Almost as pretty as you, my harlequin.</i>
</p><p>And it was nice for a while after that. Rum and gunpowder and bloody kisses and black flags. It turned out causing injuries was about a thousand times more fun than patching them up, plus I got paid in gold, jewels and fancy clothes instead of a wooden pallet in the servant’s quarters and two bowls of soup a day. And best of all I had my Captain, wild and dangerous and beautiful in a way that only I could really understand.</p><p>Of course it was too good to last. </p><p>Let me set the record straight, though: I <i>chose</i> to walk the plank. Yeah, I chose to after Captain Kerr tried to throw me over the side, but still, a choice. It’s not like I couldn’t see the island off in the distance. And if you think I didn’t take the opportunity to do a back flip and give that whole backstabbing crew the double finger on my way down, you probably haven’t heard the name Harley Quinn before today.</p><p>This isn’t to say that the breakup didn’t hurt. I really thought it was true love, what the Captain and I had. I’ll admit that for the first week on the island, I spent most of the time I wasn’t sucking down raw gull eggs or smacking coconuts against rocks crying my eyes out. Couldn’t get a fire lit until the third day, that’s how much blubbering I was doing. But time heals all wounds, and pretty soon I had a cozy little shack on the beach next to a fire that I kept lit day and night and was thinking I had it pretty good. All the roasted gull and coconut milk wasn’t doing great for my complexion, but besides that I was getting used to island living, and would have been well on my way to getting over whatsizface. If it weren’t for that parrot.</p><p>They’re mimics, those birds. I don’t remember why, but I sure remember how.  I guess I <i>had</i> been the loudest thing on the island, during those brokenhearted, feeling sorry for myself days. Still, you’d think that after a week that bird would have moved on to some other impression. But nope, all day long I had to hear my own voice, boo-hooing all around through the jungle. Reminding me how pathetic I’d been. Reminding me how the one person I thought really, truly understood me had screwed me over.</p><p>Setting the jungle on fire was an overreaction, I’ll admit it. But damn, was it satisfying to hear that parrot finally shut up.</p><p>Of course, that meant that my tropical paradise was now about to get a lot more extra crispy, and I hadn’t even thought to salvage enough wood to build a boat. The jungle burned and the black smoke rose higher and I was just thinking <i>Well, Past Harley, you really boned Future Harley but good this time</i>, when I saw the unmistakable silhouette of a ship way out on the horizon.</p><p>I wasn’t scared when the ship got closer and saw the black sails and the jolly roger flying from the mast. As far as anyone on this ship knew, I was still the Captain Kerr’s consort, and emphatically not to be fucked with. I figured I could hitch a ride as far as Tortuga and then disappear for a while. Maybe cut my hair, get an interesting facial scar and open up a seaside tavern. </p><p>Then the ship got close enough that I could read its name. <i>False Face</i> was painted on the side, and the man at the helm wore an expensive silver-blue frock coat, and a mask.</p><p>You know how on old maps, when the cartographers got to a point where they didn’t have a goddamn clue what was actually there, they just wrote, “Here There Be Monsters,” and called it a day?</p><p>Well, that wasn’t exactly a lie. There were monsters, out on the sea. They just weren’t what the cartographers thought they were.</p><p>And let me tell you, I would have been <i>much</i> happier to be dealing with a kraken or a sea serpent than with Roman Sionis, Thin-Skinned, Homicidal Diva of the Spanish Main.</p><p>Those maps, they’re meant to keep you from straying too far outside the boundaries society has set for you. You see “Here There Be Monsters”, and you’re supposed to decide you don’t feel much like adventure after all. Best just stick to established trade routes, only talk to people you know, wait out the last two years of your servitude instead of throwing a torch through a doctor’s bedroom window and seeing what happens next.</p><p>Can you imagine actually living like that?</p><p>Me neither.</p><p>——</p><p>To understand why my luck just went from bad to worse, you’ll need to know a bit more about Roman Sionis.</p><p>In my experience, most people who turn to a life of piracy really aren’t all that bad. Society these days only allows you to be one of maybe six things (and go ahead and cut that number in half if you’ve got lady parts), so if you find yourself wishing you had some other options, you too may hear the sea call your name. A lot of pirates are just square pegs in a world of round holes, trying to get by.</p><p>Then you have people like Captain Romey, born into wealth, afforded all the options that a rich, handsome landowner could possibly expect. But a life of luxury didn’t provide enough opportunities to carve people’s faces off, so the scion of the Sionis fortune sold off his daddy’s plantation, bought himself a ship, started calling himself The Black Mask and dedicated himself to his true calling of making life difficult for anybody who pissed him off, and a lot of people who were just minding their own business but might have pissed him off sometime in the future if left to their own devices. </p><p>Romey was a prick, and a psychopath, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that for years I’d been waaaay up on Romey’s list of <i>People Who’s Insides Need to Be Their Outsides</i>, and the only reason that he’d never made a move was that he, just like about everyone else who knew how to lash two planks together and float away from shore, knew better than to cross Captain Kerr. Romey was crazy, but my Captain was crazier, and everybody knew it.</p><p>Now I was on my own, and going to have to hope reputation and whatever mind games I could come up with were enough to get me back to civilization with my skin on right-side out. </p><p>There’s an expression that goes, “Never argue with an idiot. They drag you down to their level and then they beat you with experience.”</p><p>The same goes for trying to outfox someone who’s not just crazy like a fox, but so crazy that foxes get together for catty little brunch sessions to talk about how absolutely bugshit they are.</p><p>But there I was a short lifeboat trip later, standing on the deck of the <i>False Face</i> with no weapons except a couple of sharpened gull bones I was using to pin up my hair, trying to remind the band of troglodytes that made up Romey’s crew that messing with me was going to bring down way more trouble than they wanted to deal with.</p><p>It almost worked. I’d just about convinced them that I was on that island for secret crime-related reasons and that a huge reward was in store for them if they brought me back to Port Gotham to meet up with the <i>Jester</i>. </p><p>When who should come winging out of the jungle but that fucking parrot.</p><p>We all watched as it lighted on the railing, fanned out its big stupid tail-feathers, and started making what was apparently its favorite noise in the whole wide world now.</p><p>I might have been able to play off the crying sounds as something else, but of course it had to take that moment to be a little show-off.</p><p>“You’ll see!” it screeched. “I don’t need you or your ship, you low-life, backstabbing, pencil-dicked <i>clown</i>!”</p><p>I’ve heard about the benefits of a rebound when your heart’s been broken. Get over someone by getting under someone else, and all that good stuff. I have a theory that thirst for revenge works the same way.</p><p>I’d spent my whole time on that island thinking of all the ways I’d make Joseph Kerr pay for what he did to me. But that was over now. I didn’t care if I never laid eyes on him again.</p><p>From now on, my nemesis was that bird. </p><p>But first, I was going to have to convince Roman Sionis not to cut me up into little pieces. I had to think of a story fast.</p><p>“Kill me,” I told them, “and you’ll never find out where Captain Kerr hid the Bertinelli Diamond.”</p><p>So sue me, I fell back on an old stereotype. Not all pirates live for murder and pillaging, but I hadn’t met one yet that didn’t get at least a little excited when you start talking about buried treasure.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Chapter 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>They ended up throwing me in the brig, which, <i>rude</i>. We had a long trip ahead of us. To buy myself time to either escape or make up some other bullshit story, I’d told Romey that we’d hidden the diamond on Barracuda Island, a rocky little pirate way-station in the middle of fuck-ass nowhere. You’d think in light of how long we were gonna be stuck together, he’d try to make nice. At least give me some opportunity to socialize. </p><p>Now, I think I know what you’re thinking. <i>Socializing, Harley? On a ship full of drunken, violent, bored criminals? You sure that’s such a good idea?</i> Could be you’ve heard some stereotypes about pirates besides the old buried treasure one. Well, let me explain something to you about Harley Quinn.</p><p>I don’t hide. There’s people out there that want you to believe that if you just keep your eyes down and dress in muted colors and basically spend every waking moment of your life trying to apologize for being a woman, that’ll protect you from becoming a victim. It takes about thirty seconds of dedicated research to figure out what a load of crap that is, so you can handle it on your own time. Point is, I know better. And I <i>like</i> wearing bright colors, and talking to people, and getting a little drunk sometimes. Someone takes that as an invitation to invade my personal space? I take that as an invitation to shove a sharpened gull-bone into their nasal cavity.</p><p>Take the two barnacle-suckers who crept down into the brig shortly after the sun went down. Making kissy noises and cooing “Here, kitty-kitty,” and all that garbage. You think if I’d been wearing some sensible petticoats instead of the red pantaloons and frock coat combo I’d jumped off the <i>Jester</i> in (somewhat tattered, and dirty enough to stand up on their own by this point, but still totally fetching), that would have made them more inclined to respect me? Please.</p><p>I’d backed up against the wall to give myself a little more space to work, figuring I’d go for a crotch-kick/eye-gouge combo before letting my hair down and really having some fun. But while those two were still trying to figure out how to get the key into the lock in the dark (and if that wasn’t a precursor to what a waste of time this was going to be, I don’t know what is), the hold opened again and another person came down the steps. A woman.</p><p>“Captain’s looking for you two,” she said in a dark, smoky voice.</p><p>“Captain’s having supper in his quarters,” the shorter, hairier pirate answered. “He can wait.”</p><p>The taller, paler one turned to the woman, who was carrying a lantern and a set of keys. “Find somewhere else to sleep tonight, little birdie. It’s gonna get noisy down here.”</p><p>I saw a <i>very</i> pissed-off look cross the woman’s face, then she put down the lantern and I couldn’t see her at all.</p><p>I heard a jingle, and then a squawking sound, followed by a lot of gurgling.</p><p><i>Holy shit,</i> I thought, <i>did she stab him in the throat with a key?</i></p><p>“I don’t know,” she said in that same delicious voice. “I don’t think I mind the noise.”</p><p>The two low-lifes got moving after that, and my new roommate picked her lantern back up and unlocked the cell across from mine. I was surprised, because the cell was empty, and I was even more surprised when she stepped inside and locked herself in.</p><p>“Are you a prisoner here?” I asked her.</p><p>“You know a lot of prisoners that get to hold onto their own keys?” she snapped back. Now that she was seated in a pool of yellow light, I could see that she was gorgeous, with honey-colored dreadlocks and a gold ring through her septum. The kind of pretty face that makes you want to shut up and really think about what you’re gonna say.</p><p>“Guess not,” was what I came up with, because I hadn’t been single for a long time and I clearly had some adjusting to do. “This place have some amenities I don’t know about? Hot towels, room service, anything like that?”</p><p>“It’s got a door between me and these scumbags that I can lock,” she answered. “And it’s <i>usually</i> quiet.”</p><p>Alright. Just cause I’m friendly doesn’t mean I can’t take a hint. </p><p>Of course, just because I can doesn’t mean I have to.</p><p>“Name’s Harley,” I said, sticking my arm out through the bars and shaking hands with nothing.</p><p>“I know who you are.” She didn’t reach out to shake back, but she did crack a tiny bit of a smile. “We actually met, once, in Tortuga. You were drinking rum punch out of a crocodile skull.”</p><p>“Oh my god!” I thought back on that night, and suddenly I did remember this girl. Me and a few members of the <i>Jester’s</i> crew were bar-hopping around the island, and we’d stopped off in this one joint where you could pay to wrestle crocodiles, hence the unusual glassware, and there’d been a tiny stage near the front. This girl had been up there, wearing a yellow silk dress and black boots, and she’d been singing. Her voice had been…exceptional. I couldn’t remember why, exactly.</p><p>“So you work for Romey, now? What are you, like, Head Officer of Sea Shanties?”</p><p>“Not exactly,” she sighed. “I’m Dinah Lance, by the way. Not sure if you remembered.”</p><p>“Yeah, a lot of that night’s a bit fuzzy.”</p><p>She actually laughed, quick and sharp. “Look,” she said. “I don’t know what your game is here, but if you want to stay alive, you should take care not to make the Captain angry. He’s…unpredictable.”</p><p>“I’m not scared of Roman Sionis,” I told her. “I’m not scared of nobody.”</p><p>“I’m not telling you to be scared,” she replied. “Just smart.”</p><p><i>If you’re so smart,</i> I thought, <i>how come you’re here, when you clearly aren’t happy about it?</i></p><p>I didn’t say that, though. Sometimes even I know when to keep my mouth shut.</p><p>——</p><p>The sky outside the porthole was just starting to lighten when the sound of footsteps on the stairs woke me up.</p><p><i>Oh, for Pete’s sake, not this shit again,</i> I had time to think, but then I heard the Captain’s voice and realized this wasn’t a social call.</p><p>“Wake up, little bird. We need you on deck.”</p><p>I saw Dinah sit up, squinting in the lantern light. Roman was leaning against the bars of her cell, smiling down at her. Despite the fact that it was clearly sometime between midnight and dawn, he was dressed in his full captain’s outfit. Buttery-soft leather boots, crushed velvet coat, big old feathered hat. He must have spent nearly as much of his family fortune on flamboyant outfits as he did on buying the ship. God only knows how he kept them all clean.</p><p>There was someone standing just behind Roman as well, just out of the lantern’s glow.</p><p>Dinah stretched and rubbed her eyes. “Royal Navy?” she asked, her voice husky from sleep.</p><p>“Merchants,” Roman said, grinning. “Spotted them to the east. We need you to reel them in.”</p><p>I heard a low chuckle from the figure in the shadows. Dinah frowned.</p><p>“A lot of those ships have passengers on them. Families.”</p><p>“I’m sorry?” Roman cocked his head. “Are you saying something that isn’t, ‘Yes, Captain?’ Did I hear her correctly, Zsasz?” </p><p>The man in the shadows moved closer to Roman, close enough into the light that I could see the scars on his face.</p><p>Captain Sionis’s first mate, Victor Zsasz, was what you could call an artist with a knife. Not like the kind of artist that hones their craft until they can paint a sunset in oils that would bring a tear to your eye. More the kind of artist that makes a sculpture of the Virgin Mary out of fingernail clippings and dead flies because it shuts up the voices in their head for a few goddamn minutes. He was loyal to Roman in a way that went right past “doglike” into “parasitic” territory, and he scared the hell out of almost everybody. The fact that Dinah didn’t immediately back down when he did that creepy laugh again was a real testament to her badassery. I knew I was gonna like her.</p><p>“She said she’s not gonna do it, Captain,” he muttered through a mouthful of stained teeth.</p><p>“Oh, was that what she said? You know, Dinah, that’s a real shame. I thought we had a good working relationship here, but if you’re not interested in pulling your weight anymore-“</p><p>“I didn’t say that,” Dinah interrupted, fishing out her keys and reaching through the bars to unlock the door. “Just…we only need the cargo, right? No need to hurt anybody who doesn’t ask for it?”</p><p>Roman held the cell door open for her, giving her a little bow as she passed. Tipping his hat, even. Christ. </p><p>“Well, they do have lifeboats. I’m sure they’ll do the honorable thing and send the women and children on their way before we get to them.”</p><p>Dinah pursed her lips into a thin, hard line, and ascended the steps. Roman followed her, with Zsasz trailing behind.</p><p>Up until then, none of them had even acknowledged I was there. But before he left, Zsasz turned back and stared at me, giggling. Didn’t say a word, just tittered for a few seconds  and then scampered after the Captain.</p><p>Yeah, that definitely wasn’t a good sign. I needed to get working on an escape plan like, yesterday.</p><p>After a couple of minutes alone in the hold, I heard singing from up on deck.</p><p>Even through the heavy planks separating us, Dinah’s voice hit me right in the gut. Something about the way it swelled and swooped, as wild and powerful as the ocean itself, made me feel like laughing and crying at the same time. I wanted to be inside that voice, to swim in it. I didn’t care what was in my way, I needed to get closer, needed…</p><p>I realized I was pressed up against the bars, so hard that when I pulled away, the iron had left red marks on my skin.</p><p><i>What the…</i> I thought, and then the shooting started.</p><p>I heard gunfire, swords clashing, people screaming. Laughter. It seemed like the laughter and the screaming went on long after the gunfire and other sounds of battle stopped.</p><p>I didn’t see Dinah again until that evening, and she didn’t say a word to me. Just locked herself in and blew out the light.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Chapter 3</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>By the time we were in sight of Barracuda Island, I was so bored I had started drawing faces on the individual planks of wood that made up the floor of my cell and given them all names, backstories and dark secrets. Drawing with what, you ask? Don’t worry about it.</p><p>I was sitting on the floor, trying to figure out how to resolve the love triangle between Woodrow, Plankenstein and Ethel Splintersnatch, when I heard the bustle of activity on deck that signaled we were about to make landfall. A little while later two goons came down to haul me out of the brig. I never got to resolve my board story. I hope those crazy kids were able to work it out on their own.</p><p>Outside, it was the kind of day that makes a person fall in love with the seafaring life. The sun was shining, the gulls were squawking and the breeze was strong enough to blow away the smell of the fresh corpses hanging from the yardarm. I looked around for Dinah, found her seated on a crate where she’d be out of the way, watching me. I looked from her to the corpses, then back to her. Not to be judge-y, more just to communicate something along the lines of, <i>Sucks to be them, huh?</i> But she narrowed those big almond eyes and scowled at me. Guess levity in the face of horrible murder wasn’t her thing. </p><p>I closed my eyes to take in a deep breath of salt air, and instead smelled sweat and dangerously co-stimulated violence and arousal responses. I looked up and found Victor Zsasz lurking next to me, trying to look sociopathically detached, a look you can’t really pull off once you’ve carved a bunch of scars into your face. There’s only so much you can do to prove you don’t give a fuck before you circle back around to giving way too much of one.</p><p>“Here’s what gonna happen next,” he muttered. “You, me and the Captain are going ashore. You’re going to take us to where the diamond is. If it’s not there, I carve your guts out. If it <i>is</i> there, we all come back to the ship, you go back into your cage and I wait until after we’ve retrieved the treasure to carve your guts out. Any questions?”</p><p>I didn’t have any questions. I <i>did</i> have some observations, mainly that it was interesting that Roman didn’t trust anyone on his crew but Zsasz to see the diamond. But I kept that to myself. If I mentioned it, Zsasz might have taken that as encouragement to keep threatening me, and the misty look he would get in his eyes when he got going on that topic always made me wanna gag. It was the look you or I would get when talking about our first kiss. Well, yours maybe. My first kiss was technically with a monkey, and then the second one, right after that, was with a guy who trained monkeys for a living. Either way, not something I needed to be reminded of.</p><p>Barracuda Island was the kind of sprawling, chaotic outlaw haven where you could shoot a man in broad daylight, then trade the still-smoking gun to his friend for the fillings in his teeth and a bag of pipe tobacco. Captain K took me there for our one-year anniversary. For our big night on the town, he took my gun, my knives and all my money and left me stranded on the far side of the island wearing a frilly pink ball-gown and silk slippers. I had to make my way back to the <i>Jester</i> on my own before they left at dawn. I never had so much fun in my life. For our two-year anniversary I planned to do something similar to him involving some ether, the island-bound Saint Rigobert Monastery and a leopard-skin banana hammock, but alas, fate had other plans.</p><p>When Zsasz and I got over to the lifeboat, Roman was already perched inside, as was Dinah. </p><p>“Thought you and me were taking the bitch to shore alone,” Zsasz said to Roman. I did <i>not</i> say, “Now, Victor, that’s not a very nice thing to call your Captain,” for which I deserve a freaking medal.</p><p>Roman smiled. “I thought our little bird could come in handy if Miss Quinn decides to make a run for it. It’s a small island, and Dinah’s voice carries <i>very</i> far.”</p><p>Captain Roman Sionis wasn’t about to paddle his own boat, and he insisted that Dinah “save her strength”, so that left rowing to me and Victor. After four days of nothing to eat but hardtack and moldy bread, I wasn’t in what you’d call tip-top shape, so after about two minutes I was dripping with sweat and nearly too tired to think. That might have been Romey’s plan, to leave me too exhausted for an escape attempt, or he just might have been a sadistic bastard who would rather use an electric eel for a condom than pass up on an opportunity to make me look like a weakling.</p><p>While I rowed, I tried to think of some way I could work this combination of personalities to my advantage. Dr. Crane told me some riddle once, about a goat, a wolf, a cabbage, and a farmer with history’s weirdest shopping list. It was kind of like that, a logic puzzle where everything would fall into place and seem completely obvious if I could just <i>think</i> it right.</p><p>
  <i>Let’s see. Romey probably doesn’t care enough about Dinah for taking her hostage to be useful. Can’t take Zsasz hostage, cause then I’d have to touch him. Dinah is no fan of Romey, that’s obvious- if I put a gun to his head there’s a fifty-fifty chance she’ll split my way and help me subdue Zsasz, but then if he’s able to overpower her I have to save her too or I’ll just look like an asshole, so…</i>
</p><p>My thoughts were interrupted by Dinah nudging my knee with her toe.</p><p>“Yeah?”</p><p>“He asked you a question,” Dinah muttered, jerking her head at Roman.</p><p>“Sorry, Cap’n.” I fanned the sweat stains under my pits, just because I knew he’d hate that. “What was your question?”</p><p>“I asked,” he said, wrinkling his nose at me,”how Captain Kerr got his hands on the Bertinelli Diamond in the first place. Guido Bertinelli always swore it was at the bottom of the ocean.”</p><p>“Kept swearing it right up until the end,” Zsasz added. “Didn’t change his story once, no matter how many parts we cut off him.”</p><p>“Right,” I stalled. Thing was, there were a lot of conflicting stories out there about the fabled diamond said to hold the key to Guido Bertinelli’s fortune. All the stories agreed that you had to hold the diamond aloft at an exact time and date on an exact spot of the Bertinelli estate, at which point the setting sun would filter through the gem and point to the place where all the treasure was buried. Problem was, that was where people stopped agreeing. Ask twenty different people and you would get twenty different theories about the proper date, time and location, not to mention where the fucking diamond was even supposed to be. I personally had no idea. But Captain Kerr hid a lot of booty on Barracuda Island, and I was positive there were some big diamonds in the mix there. My plan was to find our stash, grab the biggest one, tell Romey it was the Bertinelli diamond and either escape before we got back on the <i>False Face</i>, or escape sometime between Barracuda Island and Port Gotham. The problem was I’d gotten so wrapped up in thinking of escape plans that I forgot I needed a plausible cover story.</p><p>“Killer Croc found it,” I said. “Dove under to snag some lobsters for the crew’s supper and came up with the diamond. Captain hid it on Barracuda until we could figure out the key.”</p><p>All three of them looked at me funny. Okay, yeah, if you’re trying to come up with a believable lie, “helpful crocodile man” isn’t a great place to start. But he did run with the <i>Jester’s</i> crew for a while. And come on, give me a break, I was <i>starving</i>.</p><p>“Interesting,” Roman said. “Do you think she’s lying-“</p><p>Zsasz opened his mouth to answer, but Roman wasn’t finished.</p><p>“-Miss Lance?”</p><p>Dinah frowned, and Zsasz looked at her like she’d pissed in his morning gruel.</p><p>“Well?”</p><p>“I think she wouldn’t still be alive if she was as dumb as she looks,” Dinah said. “And lying to you would be pretty dumb, Captain.”</p><p>She looked at me when she said it. I got the point and all, but damn. What happened to not kicking a girl when she’s down?</p><p>
  <i>You keep insulting me like that, Missy, and you can say goodbye to your chance to catch me on the rebound.</i>
</p><p>What? I had to occupy my mind <i>somehow</i> while I was locked up in the brig.</p><p>——</p><p>Despite my hurt feelings and low blood sugar, good luck started coming my way once we got to shore. Some reconnaissance on the docks confirmed that no one had seen the <i>Jester</i> since the last time I’d been there as part of the crew, and Captain K’s stash was right where I thought it would be, buried under an outhouse attached to a brothel on the western quadrant.</p><p>Look, it’s a pirate haven. Most of the good hiding spots have been in pirate families for generations. Any two trees that form an X have so many caches buried underneath them that when a storm hits, the biggest risk to the population is broken toes from tripping over all the unearthed chests. Sometimes you have to get creative.</p><p>Of course, Romey made me dig for it, which wasn’t exactly a hoot and a half, but at least it wasn’t shark week at the brothel.</p><p>So there I was, exhausted and covered in wet muck, opening up the chest my old crew had buried and digging around for the biggest diamond I could find. I found one about the size of a lime I thought would do, held it up and said, “Here it is.”</p><p>I’m slowing down in the retelling here, because what happened next happened very fast.</p><p>Someone yelled, “Stop! Thief!”</p><p>It was kind of like yelling, “What’s up, nerd?” at a chess tournament. We all looked up. One of the working girls was standing in the doorway of the brothel, shouting after what looked like a chubby little boy, barelllng right toward us. The kid clearly had an escape route planned that did not have four people gathered around a big hole in the ground when he’d planned it out, and fishtailed as he approached, trying to avoid crashing into us. He failed, tripped over the chest, crashed into my legs and knocked me flat on my ass. The diamond dropped out of my hand and lay glistening in the slick mud.</p><p>The kid might have been clumsy, but he was quick. He snatched up the diamond, leapt to his feet and bolted in the direction of the beach.</p><p>“What…” Roman sounded a bit like someone had given his nuts a good twist. “…the FUCK just happened?”</p><p>Zsasz was looking at Roman. Dinah was looking after the kid. A plan popped into my head, and I didn’t have time to question it.</p><p>“Sorry, gorgeous,” I said, and punched Dinah in the throat.</p><p>She squawked and dropped to her knees. I took off in the same direction that the kid had gone.</p><p>If I ever saw her again, I’d let her have a free shot. In the meantime, if that kid was running for the beach, maybe there was a ship waiting for him, and there was a more than decent chance that whoever the Captain was would be friendlier than Roman Sionis. Maybe I could talk my way onto the crew. After all, what captain isn’t looking for a malnourished, shit-covered, escaped indentured servant with a criminal record and a lifelong quest to kill a parrot to join his team?</p><p>You know what? Don’t answer that.</p>
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<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Chapter 4</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>So do I even need to tell you there was no ship waiting for the kid? Things rarely go from “we’re fucked” to “we’re fine” on a dime like that. Trust me; when they do, treasure it.</p><p>We hit the beach and kid immediately started climbing out onto the rocks, muddy feet slipping here and there but still moving way faster than I would have been able to. This was obviously part of his regular escape routine. I climbed out after him anyway, figuring there was always a chance he’d fall and snap his ankle or something, give me a chance to catch up. Oh, don’t look at me like that. Yeah, he was a kid, but childhood is a luxury you can’t afford on the high seas.</p><p>So when he dropped out of sight, I thought “Alright! Someone’s luck just turned around!” I scrambled over the rocks to where I last saw him, hoping to find him nursing a bloody shinbone and working on his most puppy-eyed apologies. </p><p>What I found was some clothes flopping in the tide, a few strips of algae slapping against the rocks, and fuck-all else. Like the kid had poofed out of existence. Along with the diamond.</p><p>“Shit!” I yelled. “Shitting fucking cuntburglar! Dickrag! Cocktangle!”</p><p>That helped a little, so I sat down on the least slimy rock I could reach to regroup. Roman would likely be sending his crew to comb the island and find me. Dinah probably had her voice back by now, so the reason they weren’t using her to reel me in had to be because they had a better plan. Or she’d managed to escape them too. I hoped it was the latter for her sake, but I wasn’t about to count on it.</p><p>Once again, my situation would have been improved a thousandfold if I just had some <i>fucking</i> earplugs.</p><p><i>When I get out of this, I’m gonna become a beekeeper,</i> I thought as I kept moving. I could see a little outcropping of rocks that looked like they might contain a cave. I didn’t expect to find it unoccupied, not on this island, but I was pissed off enough at this point that I gave myself a fair shot at scaring off anyone or anything who might be in there. <i>I’m gonna make beeswax earplugs and sell them all over the high seas and make a goddamn fortune. Sirens, parrots, your bunkmate singing “I gave her my heart and she gave me the crabs, so hey nonny-nonny ho-ho” for the thousandth time- the only thing Dr. Quinn’s Magic Ear Protectors can’t block out is the voices in your own head.</i></p><p>It was a good fantasy, since it also involved me having an army of superintelligent bees to do my bidding. It got me across the rocks, anyway. I got to the cave, saw the remains of a fire pit, a pair of rotting leather boots I could smell from ten feet away, some bloody towels and a pile of knives and guns. The cave’s owner did not appear to be home.</p><p>At least, the thirty seconds where I thought that was true sure were nice.</p><p>“Freeze, slag,” a voice behind me said. A female voice, lightly accented and rough around the edges. “Put your hands up and turn around slowly.”</p><p>I put my hands up. I turned.</p><p>The woman holding the pistol was older than me, with some lines on her face that only partially hid the fact that she must have been a real cutie-pie in her youth. She had thick brown hair that looked like she’d cut it with a cutlass, probably the one that was hanging from her belt. Her clothes were threadbare and dirty, but under the layers of salt and grime I could make out the distinct blue jacket with gold insignia of the Royal Navy.</p><p>“Harleen Quinzel,” she said. “As an acting lieutenant of the Royal Navy, I hereby place you under arrest. If you resist, I will shoot you.”</p><p>It wasn’t that I didn’t believe her. Most Royal Navy officers don’t have the imagination to tell you anything but the exact truth. And I had to hand it to her, that pistol she had on me was steady as a rock, even with the wind blowing and the waves smacking at our legs. She probably could have put a bullet just about anywhere she wanted, and the way she was looking at me suggested that right between my eyes was her number one choice.</p><p>But here’s the thing. Royal Navy officers are the squarest bunch of stiff-lipped, stuffed-shirt, stick-assed dullards who ever figured out that wood doesn’t sink in water. The only thing a Royal Navy officer loves more than rules is someone else being punished for breaking the rules, preferably in public so they can stand there in their starched uniforms reminding each other how much better they are than everyone else. And by everyone else, I mean everyone who isn’t a white male, preferably with just the right political connections and family name. Most of them would likely prefer the company of Roman Sionis over whoever this woman was.</p><p>So whatever this woman’s connection to the Royal Navy was, I was willing to be there were some gaps between how she <i>wanted</i> things to be and how they actually were.</p><p>Those gaps? Those are the places where a gal like me fits. </p><p>“Don’t shoot,” I said, keeping my hands up. “You know who I am? Great. So obviously you know who I run with.”</p><p>“Uh-uh, no way, sister,” she snapped. “Don’t think you can pass yourself off as chum to save yourself. You’re a fat, juicy codfish, and Lieutenant Montoya has got you on her line.”</p><p>Okay, now I was starting to worry that this woman was just a garden-variety lunatic who’d found some Navy officer’s corpse and stolen their uniform. Possibly after mistaking them for a codfish and eating them. I mean really, who talks like that?</p><p>“I came here aboard the <i>False Face</i>,” I carried on. “As a prisoner. Captain Sionis is here, with his whole crew, looking for me. Come on, you’d be crazy to bring me in when you’ve got a shot at him.”</p><p>“Bullshit.” She took a step closer, pistol still leveled at my chest. “Roman Sionis doesn’t take prisoners.”</p><p>“Not usually, no, but the circumstances here are, uh, special.”</p><p>She glared at me a moment, then gestured with the gun at a piece of driftwood that looked like it was serving her as a bed. I sat down on it and slowly dropped my hands to my lap, folded like a proper little lady.</p><p>“Talk,” she said.</p><p>I tried to think of the best place to start.</p><p>“Lieutenant Montoya,” I said. “Have you ever been in love?”</p><p>——</p><p>I caught her up on the story, from me being marooned up until I’d chased the kid out onto the rocks. I wasn’t exactly encouraged, at first, given how pissed-off she looked. About halfway through, though, she lowered the gun to rest on her knee, grabbed a bottle of rum out from under the pile of towels, pulled the cork out with her teeth and drank from it all without changing her expression. After that I figured that was just the way her face was.</p><p>Gotta be honest, it was a pretty good look for her.</p><p>“So,” I concluded, “Captain Romey and his band of scurvy dogs will be all over the place looking for me, looking for the diamond, looking for that kid. They’d never see you coming. You get the drop on Roman, you can have him in the brig and on his way to swing before they know what hit ‘em. You <i>do</i> have a ship around here somewhere, right?”</p><p>I knew she didn’t- why the hell else would she be living in a cave?- but I wanted to see if she’d lie to cover that up. And how well she did it.</p><p>“I had a ship,” she said, scowling. “It was stolen from me.”</p><p>“Ah.” I tried to smile sympathetically. “Look, just so you’re aware, it’s almost never personal with us pirates. We just go where the wind takes us, ya know?”</p><p>“It <i>was</i> personal.” Her eyes flashed. “And it wasn’t pirates.”</p><p>I waited for her to elaborate, and when she didn’t, I started babbling. “Oh! Okay then. Good. Good for us, anyway. For our, uh, partnership?”</p><p>“Nice try,” she said. “We’re not partners, Quinn. You help me catch Roman Sionis, I’ll give you a day and a night to get as far away as possible. We don’t catch him, I’m settling for you instead.”</p><p>“What if I helped get your ship back, too? It was stolen once, it can be stolen back!”</p><p>She laughed without smiling. “Is that what passes for pirate wisdom?”</p><p>“Hey, I’m not the one living in a cave.”</p><p>“Sounds like you’re not living anywhere right now, toots,” she said. She stood up, checked her pistol and holstered it. “Alright, let’s go digging for some clams. And by clams, I mean intel, and by digging, I mean let’s beat some scumbags to a pulp.”</p><p>Good Lord. I wondered if bagging Roman and getting her ship back would do anything to improve Montoya’s metaphors.</p><p>Probably not. As the old pirate saying goes, “When all you have is a sea cucumber, everything starts to look like a geoduck.” </p><p>Something like that, anyway.</p>
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